When billions of dollars depend on your information technology, it had better be good. That is why banks need the best IT talent, and lots of it. The global IT workforce at Credit Suisse is 10,000. At Goldman Sachs it is 8,000. JP Morgan employs 4,500 people in IT in Europe.

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It is also why banks have a problem if the latest generations of techies would rather work somewhere else.

For many of today’s IT graduates, the cool place to find a job is one of the tech giants – such as Google or Facebook – or some smart start-up that could turn out to be the next one.

Banks used to have one killer way to attract the best graduates – pay more. But with bank budgets tightening and pay at tech firms rising, that no longer works. They are having to find other ways to seduce top talent.

Laura Pearman, Europe, the Middle East and Africa head of campus recruitment at Credit Suisse, said: “We have seen a lot more competition, which has meant the banks have had to step up what they do.”

One tactic is to dress up their IT workspaces to look more like the laid-back environments in Silicon Valley, with their bright cushions, retro chintzes and coffee bars.

The problem, however, is much more about the technology than the look. It is easy for today’s graduates to visualise what they might be working on if they got a job somewhere like Facebook – they have grown up using the products. Never mind hands on, they have never been hands off. Not so many have hands-on knowledge of a bank’s trading platforms.

Banks are therefore engaging with promising students early, at university or even at school.

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Bank of America Merrill Lynch is developing applications it can take to career fairs to show potential recruits what they would be working on. Credit Suisse executives give programming lessons at a top UK university, while Goldman Sachs visits around 30 universities across Europe during recruiting season.

Simon Cooper, chief information officer for corporate and investment banking core processing technology at JP Morgan, said: “The bottom line is you have to work incredibly hard to get your message across. From a banking perspective, we as an industry need to do a better job in explaining that we are technology companies to rival the Googles and IBMs of this world.”

Focus on tech

Three years ago, JP Morgan overhauled its recruitment campaign to make it more IT specific, as it seeks to be perceived by candidates more as a technology company. The new campaign, called “Be the Spark”, focuses on highlighting the role that technology plays in the organisation.

The US-based investment bank spends around $8 billion globally on IT each year. On its technology-specific recruitment web page it claims to “have the scope to influence what happens in the intellectual incubators of Silicon Valley”.

The investment bank plans to revamp some of its IT office spaces, to make them more like the environments of Google and other technology companies. The new areas will include colourful breakout lounges that allow people to work collectively and collaboratively on specific design or coding challenges.
Investment banks were traditionally among the top employers for technologists because of their vast IT departments and attractive salaries.

However, headhunters say that pay is no longer a significant differentiator, as larger technology companies offer similar rewards.

A junior programmer with one or two years’ experience would make roughly £40,000, both at a bank and at a large technology company, according to headhunters. Banks pay slightly more when IT professionals are more senior. A programmer with seven years’ experience will make £60,000 to £80,000 at a technology firm and £70,000 to £90,000 at a large bank, according to headhunters.

Clare Cooper, head of financial technology at recruitment firm Selby Jennings, said: “For technologists moving into finance, the attraction always was that it paid more. But that’s not really the case any more, especially as across the board in finance bonuses are not always guaranteed to be paid, so that attraction has depreciated over the years.”

Career advancement

With the pay gap narrowing, progression opportunities and technical differences are among the most important factors candidates consider when choosing between working at a technology firm or at a bank, headhunters said.

Specifically, applicants want to know whether they will still be able to get their hands on cutting-edge technology as they advance in their careers, rather than getting stuck writing management reports.

Stephen Rutherford, managing director in the technology practice of recruitment firm Michael Page, said: “A lot of the specialist tech people want to work in a flexible environment where they will get a chance to develop their technical skillset.”

But communicating to candidates how they will be able to develop their skills and exactly what a career in IT at a bank entails is one of the biggest challenges recruiters face.

Job appeal

Devon Kerai, 20, an engineering student at Loughborough University, currently on his placement year at London-based start-up Kusiri, said: “You don’t have that similar look on things in a bank. Often, people think of banks just as a financial company, the type of technology jobs you could do there are not as widely portrayed as maybe they should be.”

To better convey their pitch to students like Kerai, who see in start-ups and innovative large technology firms an opportunity to develop a wider range of skills, banks are increasing their visits to campuses and updating the tools they use to make their pitches.

Technology is Goldman Sachs’s largest division, more than a quarter of the workforce. The bank’s IT division fact sheet boasts that it is “larger than many pure technology firms”.

When visiting universities during recruiting season, Goldman Sachs tries to have as many face-to-face conversations with potential candidates as possible.

Sarah Harper, head of recruiting in Emea, said: “At a graduate level, we do quite a lot of technology-targeted recruiting. We have definitely increased the opportunities to speak to students on campus. To really go into the details of what a role looks like and what technology at Goldman Sachs means.”

Trading concepts

At BAML, to give a more vivid picture of what recruits would be working on, such as sophisticated trading systems, applications are being developed to use at career fairs. The bank’s global technology and operations division makes up roughly one third of its global headcount.

Dee Clarke, head of campus recruitment for Emea at BAML, said: “What we would love to do is take some of the trading concepts on to campus that they would be working on, and that is obviously hard. So we’re developing apps to take to careers fairs to showcase some of our tech projects. That is one of the challenges of technology. You need to interface with it to understand how you would be working in it.”
BAML also invites students to tour its London offices and trading floors, and for the past two years has been welcoming them to its internal technology fair, where the firm’s IT teams and external vendors display the systems they use.

Similarly, Credit Suisse introduces its team to students by running workshops, where young technologists get to work on IT challenges with bank technology executives.

In another effort to reach out, JP Morgan organises the Code for Good Challenge, an event during which technology students and executives at the bank develop solutions to issues faced by non-profit making organisations.

These initiatives give aspiring technologists an opportunity to interact with like-minded bank employees, while connecting them with the firms early on.

Lecture tours

Taking it further, some investment banks are making appearances in university lecture halls to share their technical insight.

Credit Suisse technologists run C++ programming lessons at London’s Imperial College and give some project management lectures at King’s College London. Likewise, BAML IT executives are partnering with academics at several UK universities to teach financial technology concepts.

William Knottenbelt, director of industrial liaison in the department of computing at Imperial College, said: “The majority of our students are going to be working in industry, and to have somebody senior who really knows the technical stuff come in and give students that industrial perspective is really valuable.”

BAML offers first-year computer science students one-week’s work experience in its IT department, while JP Morgan is in the first year of piloting an apprenticeship programme for post A-level students in technology areas to learn skills such as coding.

Even though they are stepping up their game, banks are aware that convincing Millennial computer scientists that they can rival the offerings of technology companies such as Google and Facebook may take some time.

Cooper at JP Morgan said: “This is a long-term exercise as far as we are concerned. We have seen an incremental improvement year on year. It is an open strategy. Each year there is a change in both competition and the market, so we constantly have to tweak and improve our strategy as we go.”

--This article first appeared in the print edition of Financial News dated March 17, 2014